U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby congratulated the people of Lebanon, describing Aoun's election as a "moment of opportunity" to restore government institutions as Lebanon emerges from years of political impasse.

One wonders how he can speak such utter bollocks without breaking out into hysterical laughter, but I guess they train you for that sort of thing over at Foggy Bottom Obamabot skool.

Update:Mark Steyn's Song of the Week is Cole Porter's "It's De-Lovely", a tune that remains e'er fresh lo these many decades since its debut. Unlike, say, the rot that is Clinton Inc., which threatens to engulf the entire country, and which grew old--really old--long ago. In view of that nasty reality, I thought I'd revise Porter's pretty ditty (for which I offer the late composer my most profuse apologies):Hillary sings to Huma:

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Two Canadian academics--this guy and this guy--have been pushing back against campus totalitarianism and the chill it's been putting on free speech. But as the Toronto Star reports, the push back is being poo-poo'd by at least one of their fellow professors:

University of Toronto physics Prof. A.W. Peet, who identifies as a nonbinary transgender person, says the debate over political correctness "is a red herring."

"I don't see any evidence whatsoever that, for example, loud, white, middle-aged, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied men are under threat from political correctness on campus," Peet said.

"It's just about these guys realizing that society is moving beyond their points of view ... and they are railing against the fact they are fading into irrelevance."

Peet's red herring is the real red herring, a noisome fish meant to disguise how "trans" is being used to further a Marxist agenda that prohibits all criticism and silences all debate (in the name of equality for and the protection of a powerless victim group, of course).And, BTW, "loud, white, middle-aged, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied men" is the group--and, aside from "Zionists," Christians and conservatives, arguably the only group--that academics and their indoctrinated students are allowed to diss, dismiss and deride on campus (due to the sin of "white male privilege") these days.

A.W. Peet is a Professor of Physics and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. They hold a B.Sc.(Hons) from the University of Canterbury and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Their awards include a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. They grew up in the South Pacific island nation of Aotearoa/New Zealand, and have a little web site at ap.io/home/. They have lived experience of misogyny, ableism, and transphobia.

Please note that Dr. Peet uses they/them pronouns.

This event falls under FemPhys' Code of Conduct. Please be respectful and considerate of others.

In other words, more hype about the wonders of algebra and calligraphy and nary a mention of the jihad, sharia and centuries of Islamic imperialism and oppression (including a slave trade that persists to this day), or the key role the OIC plays in the UN's rejection of Israel and the Israelization of global Jew-hate (because that kind of stuff would be a real downer).

visited the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), along with Education Minister Mitzie Hunter. They met on August 26, 2016 with female members of the Islamic Circle North America Sisters (ICNA Canada) in Scarborough. The ICNA directly advocates misogynist positions such as wife beating, the taking of slave girls and the position that women are, overall, inferior to men. ICNA also notes that Islamic women have been “emancipated” from the obligation of earning their own livelihood. Therefore, women can be kept at home and cannot leave the house without the permission of the husband.

Quite alarmingly, the Premier of Ontario did not criticize the organization or its heavily misogynistic beliefs. Rather she publicly claimed to have been “honoured” to have been there. The Minister of Education, Ms Hunter, appears to have remained silent on her views concerning this visit.

Not only that, Wynne, a non-Muslim and an avowed feminist, donned the obligatory Islamist headscarf in order to fit in with the sistahs, a scene that looked like this:

Well, at least she didn't feel the need to cover her face (this time, anyway).

The daughter of Yasser's brother, one of the founders of Fatah, she grew up in a household (in Saudi Arabia) that "hailed Hitler and praised the Holocaust." In a startling about face, she moved to Canada, became a Christian and had the word "Israel" tattooed--in Hebrew--on her back. Now she dreams of the day she can "come to Israel, to fly the flag and salute it.”What prompted the drastic change? In a nutshell, it was having to live under Saudi-style sharia law, which, as we know, is no fun for chicks:

“The [forced wearing of the] hijab is the main reason I left Islam…and also because of the way of life under Islamic Sharia law,” she told Channel 2.

A year has gone since Trudeau first came into office, offering a welcome message of change throughout his campaign. Yet, although Trudeau has had some accomplishments in office so far, Muslim Canadians must remain skeptical of his government and must be prepared to hold him accountable on issues that directly or indirectly impact our community. If we make the mistake of idolizing him, we risk granting him the freedom to disregard our interests. And many of his actions do indeed deserve to be critiqued.

On the question of Islamophobia, for example, many Muslims like me were initially encouraged when Trudeau publicly condemned hate crimes against Muslim-Canadians. Following the surge in incidents of racial abuse towards Muslims after the Paris attacks in late 2015, Trudeau stated, "These recent acts of intolerance have no place in our country and run absolutely contrary to Canadian values of pluralism and respect."

However, the Trudeau government has been slow to take meaningful actions that live up to our PM's words. It is true that Liberal MP Frank Baylis sponsored a Parliamentary petition against Islamophobia, which garnered almost 70,000 signatures -- more than any other Canadian petition on this issue. However, it was NDP leader Thomas Mulcair who introduced the motion in Parliament on October 6. Given that it was a Liberal MP -- Baylis -- who sponsored the petition, it is quite puzzling and rather disappointing that it was not Trudeau who introduced the motion at the House of Commons.

"Progress" on Islamophobia by Trudeau at the federal level has been far outpaced by measures, albeit mostly symbolic, taken by provincial parties. For instance, an NDP private members's bill was recently unanimously passed by the Ontario legislature, making October Islamic Heritage Month in that province. Furthermore, a resolution condemning all forms of Islamophobia was initiated by the Liberal party in Ontario and was later passed successfully just this past summer.

Yet, the Liberal party has failed to raise a similar motion at the federal level. Trudeau's federal Liberal party has thus proven to be slow to act on issues of Islamophobia. As Muslim Canadians, what we need from Trudeau is substantive action, not just encouraging words.

Denmark’s decision to separate married couples in refugee centres if one party is below the age of 18 has been reversed after the government concluded it was in violation of international conventions.

Metroxpress reported on Wednesday that the Danish Immigration Service will now reunite several married couples who have been living separately since February.

“In some of these cases it has been it has been assessed that it would not be compatible with Denmark’s international obligations to maintain the separate living quarters, thus these couple have been offered to be housed together,” DIS wrote in an official response to a parliamentary enquiry.

Specifically, the agency concluded that the separate living quarters would violate the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to one's "private and family life”.

Josephine Fock, an MP for The Alternative who raised the issue with DIS, cheered the reversal.

“It is completely outrageous. We are talking about people who have fled to Denmark who are being split from each other. Some of them have children together and investigating individual [asylum] cases takes an unbelievably long time,” Fock told Metroxpress.

In January, the Integration Ministry obtained an overview of the Danish asylum system that revealed that there are currently 27 minors who have spouses or partners. According to an earlier report in Metroxpress, there are two married 14-year-old girls at Danish asylum centres. One is married to a 28-year-old man, while the other is pregnant and has a 24-year-old husband....

So considerate of the Danes to pay obeisance to sharia law "international conventions" don't you think?

France's de-radicalization prison wings were rolled out in January this year, and saw prisoners who were convicted of terrorism housed in their own cells, where they were unable to communicate with anyone who they could potentially influence.

The inmates had to undergo a kind of de-radicalization course with psychologists and repentant former jihadists in the trial.

However while the plan may sound sensible, many had criticised it for helping jihadist networks grow.

In July a critical report suggested this isolated prison wings option was not the best solution.

The report by France’s chief prison inspector Adeline Hazan said France’s justice system was facing a phenomenon “which it had no measure of the nature or extent of”.

Her report stressed that grouping Islamist extremist prisoners together continues to worry counter-terrorist judges because of the harmful impacts which include “allowing solidarity to build between prisoners, networks to be reconstructed and allow the more influential inmates to put pressure on the most vulnerable.”

...Obama worships at his own personal altar at the First Church of Himself. Unlike [Bill] Clinton, he can't feel your pain, but his very presence is your gain--or as he put it in his video address to the German people on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: "Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent."

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Because the infidel state signed off on the establishment of sharia courts some time ago (unlike the province of Ontario, which due to a public uproar, ultimately told 'em to take a hike), the U.K., of course, is thoroughly screwed. Still, one must applaud Ms. Raza for having to courage to venture into hostile territory, and for daring to say things that are bound to raise some hackles (for instance, her assertion that terrorism and Islam are related). And at least one local thinks her message is of vital importance for the U.K. He writes:

The lesson from Canada is that if people are willing to campaign and speak out with courage and boldness about this issue, public perception and political will can change. If sharia courts can be abolished in Canada, they can be abolished here. In a meeting this week, Raza said: "Political correctness and the silence of the majority is the cause of the problem." Sharia law and its inherent discriminatory nature needs to be criticised, and the fundamental principle of one law for all needs to be defended.

Charles Krauthammer calls the Wiki leaks that revealed the soullessness/emptiness/"bottomless cynicism" of Hillary Clinton's campaign "the camera in the sausage factory."Now, there's a line--and an image--for the ages.

Friday, October 21, 2016

Why has Britain's Labour Party turned into such a simmering dung heap of Jew-hate? As Douglas Murray explains, it's because when the hatred could have been nipped in the bud (so to speak), it wasn't. Instead, it became "Israelized," and was allowed to fester and grow to the dizzying levels we see now:

The story of the takeover of the Labour Party by forces aligned with naked anti-Semitism begins with the aftermath of September 11 and the run-up to the Iraq war. In September 2002, three Jewish leftists who marched in a Stop the War demonstration described in a letter to the Guardian how they became increasingly uncomfortable with the “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish imagery” of their comrades: “Where does that leave us,” the trio wrote, “as Jews who totally oppose the war in Iraq but felt hostility or indifference from many of our fellow marchers?” The open link between leftist politics and the defenders of anti-Semitic terror in the Middle East was made clear by the way that the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament, a Cold War–era radical leftist group, allied itself with the Muslim Brotherhood to form the Stop the War coalition, one of whose leaders was Jeremy Corbyn.

The evidence of growing Jew-hatred was there for all to see, and yet for years the left refused to carry out even the most basic hygiene at events such as these. Indeed, its panjandra waved away any expressions of concern. How, they demanded, could anyone from a political movement in which “anti-racism” was one of the few remaining certainties be connected with any variety of racism? The leaders and spokesmen of these movements denied evidence that was literally before their eyes. When cornered, they hid behind an insistence that anti-Zionism was a wholly different thing from anti-Semitism—and when that no longer worked, they were left to argue in effect that anti-Semitism was not anti-Semitism. At a loftier and more private level, senior Labour members of parliament aligned with the rival moderate factions led by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his eventual successor, Gordon Brown, consoled critics with the assurance that members of their party who helped propel such forces by attending and addressing their rallies were mere eccentrics and embarrassments: persons of no significance.

Well what a difference 15 years has made. Today the Blairites and Brownites who gave such assurances are almost to a man and woman in the political wilderness, reduced to lecturing dictators for cash or appearing on reality television shows. Meanwhile, the man who spent the years of Labour power outside the Israeli and American Embassies, or at the foot of Lord Nelson’s column in London’s Trafalgar Square hollering through a megaphone at the nation’s monomaniacs now leads their party.

Hewing to the narrative that everything's hunky-dory when it comes to Islam and Muslims, the Washington Post crafts a rapturous account of America's largest Muslim charity. Trouble is, the paper fails to do any due diligence--or, at the very least, conduct a cursory Google search--re these religion-of-peace "do-gooders." Had the WaPo bothered to do so, it would have discovered that the charity is said to have some pretty unsavory ties--to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.But, hey, as in the case of the Clinton Foundation, which undoubtedly does some good works too, why accentuate the negative when you can simply eliminate it (for the sake of toeing the line re "diversity," multiculturalism, social justice and rest of the "progressive" malarkey)?

Update: Re the Islamic concept of charity, this ROP entry is most illuminating:

Charity is technically an important part of Islam, but this does not mean that it is defined as Westerners generally understand it. In Christianity, charity means giving to your fellow man in need. In Islam, it means giving either to support holy war or to a fellow Muslim - and usually through the mandated poor tax (zakat) which is precisely calculated. As Robert Spencer puts it, "Islam makes a distinction between believers and unbelievers that overrides any obligation to general benevolence."

The zakat (almsgiving) may be one of the five pillars of Islam, but the Hadith only speaks of it as a requirement to help fellow Muslims ("taken from among you and distributed among you"). Non-Muslims are not entitled to the zakat by virtue of their need, and mainstream Islamic teaching forbids Muslims to give this to unbelievers. The website TheZakat.org, for example, lists unbelievers along with the wealthy, strong and healthy as being prohibited from receiving zakat (although some Muslims may personally disagree with this).

While Islamic scholars forbid giving zakat to non-Muslims in physical need - including the victims of Islamic terror - it is acceptable to use zakat in defense of accused Muslim terrorists.

Interestingly, the Quranic verse that is said to be the basis for zakat (9:103) comes from the most violent and intolerant of suras. Its context also appears to be that of a penance taken from the property of 'hypocrites' for their sinfulness and failure to participate in battle against unbelievers.

Islamic charities that raise funds openly in the West are savvy enough to downplay the fact that beneficiaries of their assistance are selected by ethnicity, which would not go over well with non-Muslim donors. They are also known to advertise "window dressing" projects on their websites or literature, in which they claim a role in prominent disasters or causes (in disproportion to their actual contribution or concern). It is usually enough to fool others into not looking deeper.

Generally speaking, international Islamic charities are better known for funding terrorism and hate than in meeting the actual needs of natural disaster victims (bankrolling Jihad through charitable giving is mandated by the Quran 9:60). In 2014, the UAE determined that fifteen well-known Muslim charities - including the world's largest - were actually sponsoring Islamic terrorism.

Even at its most legitimate, Muslim charity to the poor is heavily tainted by ulterior political and racial agenda, such as lopsided support for Palestinians to the exclusion of Darfur victims, who suffer much worse. The latter are also Muslim, but they don't count since they are Africans oppressed by an Islamic-Arab regime. (The rule is that Muslims generally ignore the suffering of other Muslims unless non-Muslims can be held responsible).

Thursday, October 20, 2016

It's German for "coping with the past." More specifically, coping with Germany's role in perpetrating the Holocaust. As this article in The Local explains, one of the ways Germans practice Vergangenheitsbewältigung is by constructing more and more monuments and memorials for dead Jews.That's on the one hand. On the other hand, Germany is "coping with the past" by doing its utmost to finish off the Israel of today by funding Zion-despising NGOs:

The German federal government provides millions of euros to political advocacy NGOs in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, through a variety of frameworks, including German federal funding programs of the Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the German Federal Foreign Office, government-funded church aid, and independent development NGOs.

Officially, the funding is aimed at “combating poverty, securing food, establishing peace, freedom, democracy and human rights, shaping globalisation in a socially equitable manner, and preserving the environment and natural resources.” In contrast to these stated moral objectives, research reveals that German federal funding is allocated to, amongst others, organizations that promote anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and “lawfare” campaigns, anti-Zionism, promotion of a “one-state” vision, antisemitism, and violence.

We, the undersigned, Citizens and residents of Canada, call upon the House of Commons to join us in recognizing that extremist individuals do not represent the religion of Islam, and in condemning all forms of Islamophobia.

The petition requires, in other words, that you close your eyes to the reality that jihadis (a.k.a. generic "extremist individuals") are motivated to wage jihad because they are commanded to do so by/in Islam's holy texts. Not surprisingly, almost 77,000 Canadians have signed on to this comforting fiction. Many did so, I suspect, because of the second part of the above statement--that it's a way of "condemning all forms of Islamophobia." (All forms? Meaning there's more than one?)A bloke named Samer Mazjoub, who describes himself as an "initiator" of this petition, is delighted by the result. He writes:

Based on the solid support that the petition e-411 got from Canadians, a motion to condemn all forms of Islamophobia was submitted, on Oct 5, 2016, to the House of Commons for unanimous approval by all MPs. Although the unanimous motion didn't pass through due to the refusal of a small group of Conservative representatives out of the 338 members in the House of Commons, the fact that it earned the consent of the vast majority of other legislators proves that the Islamophobia is becoming a true Canadian concern.

Surely, the trip to recognize and to condemn discrimination, as it is a total contradiction to Canadian values, has not come to an end yet. Canadians from all stripes of social, political, racial and religious backgrounds are coming together at a much faster pace to stand united up to hate and smear campaigns against their fellow citizens.

You know what's a real contradiction of Canadian values? The idea that "Islamophobia"--a faux phobia invented by those determined to further the Islamist agenda--is rampant and requires parliamentary action (i.e. a curtailment of free speech) to be stopped.

So, to add to the corrupt revenue agency and the corrupt justice department, we now have a corrupt national law enforcement agency and a corrupt foreign ministry - willing, indeed, to subordinate national security and its own diplomatic policy to the personal needs of Hillary Clinton. Needless to say, if you get your news from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc, etc, you will be entirely unaware of all this. Which is the way they plan on operating for the next eight years.

A small but telling point: Wikileaks' Julian Assange has lived in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for over four years. But not until he leaked against Hillary was his Internet cut off. Hillary, out of office, has a swifter and more ruthless global reach than Hillary in office on the night of Benghazi. And, should she win, her view of her subjects is that we should have the same information access as Ecuadorian Embassy refugees.

To Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News in Dearborn, Mich., a billboard with Arabic script over the highway isn’t just a clever anti-Trump ad.

The sign, which reads from right to left, “Donald Trump, he can’t read this, but he is afraid of it,” is an invitation to get to know Dearborn's Arab-American community, the largest in the nation, and all Muslim-Americans.

“What are you afraid of Mr. Trump? People are only scared of what they don’t know,” Mr. Siblani, a Lebanese-American, tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview. “If you understand what this [billboard] really means, you don’t have to be afraid. Trump doesn’t understand our community”

Wrong. People can also be afraid of what they do know--i.e. that the violent jihad that threatens us today it is not an aberration of an otherwise peaceful religion but is a key tenant that's been there since the get-go and that's valid for all time.It would be foolish and indicative of a major death wish to not be "afraid" of that.

The Swedish Academy, which named the US singer the recipient of its prestigious accolade on Thursday, said that calls and emails had only been answered by Mr Dylan’s collaborators. The 75-year-old has so far not responded to the honour, and didn’t mention it when he appeared in concert over the weekend.

“Right now, we are doing nothing,” said Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize. She confirmed the academy did not know whether the singer would travel to Sweden in December to receive the award.

“If he doesn’t want to come, he won't come," she said. "It will be a big party in any case and the honour belongs to him."

Dylan a no-show in Sweden?That would serve 'em right for tapping a notoriously eccentric performer for their prize. (Mind you, he did show up to get this one.)

One opiner says (mixed metaphor alert) the poison pill of "guilt" is the vehicle that's driving this civilization off a cliff:

...of the many factors (such as secularization) behind this historically unprecedented acceptance of alien peoples, one stands out as most critical: a Western European sense of guilt. To many educated Western Europeans, their civilization is less about scientific advances, unprecedented levels of prosperity and the achievement of unique human freedoms, and more about colonialism, racism and fascism.

The brutal French conquest of Algeria, the uniquely evil German genocide against the Jews and the legacy of extreme nationalism cause many Europeans, in the analysis of Pascal Bruckner, a French intellectual, to see themselves as “the sick man of the planet,” responsible for every global problem from poverty to environmental rapacity; “the white man has sown grief and ruin wherever he has gone.” Affluence implies robbery, light skin manifests sinfulness.

Bruckner labels this the “tyranny of guilt” and I encountered some colorful expressions during my recent travels of such self-hatred. A French Catholic priest expressed remorse over the record of the church. A conservative German intellectual preferred Syrians and Iraqis to his fellow Germans. A Swedish tour guide put down fellow Swedes and hoped he would not be perceived as one.

Indeed, many Europeans feel their guilt makes them superior; the more they dislike themselves, the more they preen — inspiring a strange mix of self-loathing and moral superiority that, among other consequence, leaves them reluctant to commit the time and money required to bear children. “Europe is losing faith in itself, and birthrates have collapsed,” notes Irish scientist William Reville.

The para above, and the one that follows, sounds a lot what Mark Steyn outlined in America Alone--how civilizational self-loathing is resulting a precipitous--and calamitous--drop in the birth rate; in effect, a suicidal drive to "atone" for civilizational "crimes" via self-abnegation and, ultimately, extinction:

The catastrophic birth dearth underway has created an existential demographic crisis. With women of the European Union bearing just 1.58 children as of 2014, the continent lacks the offspring to replace itself; over time, this far-less-than-replacement rate means a precipitous decline in the numbers of ethnic Portuguese, Greeks and others. To maintain the welfare state and the pension machine requires importing foreigners.
These two drives — expiating guilt and replacing nonexistent children — then combine to encourage a massive influx of non-Western peoples, what the French writer Renaud Camus calls “the great replacement.”

To paraphrase the poet, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a "great replacement."

If a UN body has an Arab/Muslim majority, it should could come as no surprise when it does what it's programed to do and sticks it to Israel. That said, if anything positive can be said to have resulted from last week's denial shenanigans, it is this: it is a clear demonstration of the fact that, as per Islamic doctrine, Israel, quite simply, cannot be, and rather than coming to terms with the reality of Israel's existence, the Islamic end game is to get rid of it and replace it once and for all with a Muslim "Palestine."Update:Hamas calls UNESCO vote a victory for Palestinians

Monday, October 17, 2016

With all due respect to “every hippie English teacher” — and to the Swedes who each year give their imprimatur to some august literary giant whom most people may (or may not) have heard of — what Bob Dylan writes is not literature.

How do we know that? Try this quick and easy experiment: separate the music from the words and you’ll find that, from a literary standpoint at least, the lyrics sound far less impressive, and, in many instances, more than a little threadbare.

That is not the case with Canada’s Leonard Cohen, who was a genuine poet and novelist long before he became a singer-songwriter. His lyrics, for the most part, are sheer poetry, and can stand on their own. (As an example, I would direct your attention to the words of “Alexandra Leaving,” which are transcendentally ravishing.)

Dylan’s body of work is certainly worthy of acknowledgment. But he deserves a prize that puts him in the same company as, say, Woody Guthrie and Irving Berlin, and not one that links him to the likes of T.S. Eliot and Saul Bellow.

And now--one of my favorite Dylan songs (which, in its day, was not considered politically incorrect, but which today, were it written at all, would likely be about Quinn the Inuit):

You know what--jumping queues and making haste ain't my cup of meat, either.

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Scaramouche is my nom de Web. My real name is Mindy G. Alter, and I like to think of myself as a free speecher with a sense of humour. My bailiwick: fighting on behalf of all the good things that free speech helps safeguard, and doing my utmost to highlight the malevolence and imbicilities of those who oppose freedom, whomever they may be.